The interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing & the Semantic Web

Paul Miller

Paul Miller works at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web, providing the insights that enable you to exploit the next wave as we approach the World Wide Database. He blogs at www.cloudofdata.com.

Earlier this week, Gigaom announced their latest event; Structure
Intelligence.
“In the past year we’ve seen massive growth in Artificial Intelligence
(AI) and deep learning. Our own Derrick Harris has been covering this area
for years and we have decided it’s time to give this rapidly growing area a
platform (and conference) of its own.”
Personally, it’s great to see this area getting real attention from Gigaom.
But I’m reminded of just how long some of these issues have intersected
(or, often, passed close-by) my own career…
Back in the mid-1990’s, I was researching a Ph.D in the Archaeology
Department at the University of York. Nothing particularly semantic or
artificially intelligent about that… except that a fellow student was
building a neural network that inferred all sorts of things about Viking
sheep, based on cues derived from photographs of their excavat... (more)

I wasn’t going to talk about the current fuss around PRISM, but the speed
with which conjecture, rumour and some (good) newspaper investigative work
has turned into ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ online makes this worth
addressing.
The conjecture may be correct. The NSA, the FBI, TLA and ETLA might be
plugged right into the data centres of the internet’s giants, slurping down
your messages, searches and calls. If they are, that’s potentially
serious. But we don’t actually know that they are, yet. Until then,
reporters, bloggers, analysts and pundits are speculating and considering
implica... (more)

Paul Miller's Blog
For too long, the emphasis in Cloud Computing circles has been almost
exclusively upon provision of rapidly scalable and ad hoc remote computing on
top of cost-effective commodity hardware. The Cloud play from Salesforce,
Amazon’s EC2 and the rest has been dominated by the implicit assumption
that these Cloud-based resources are an extension of the corporate data
center; a way to simply reduce the costs of enterprise computing. There is
value in this business, but there are bigger opportunities. Cloud Computing,
and the various *aaS movements, have finally brou... (more)

I’ve written and spoken before about a recent upsurge in enthusiasm for
exposing data from Government in ways that facilitate use and re-use, and
will doubtless be returning to this topic in the ‘Government Data’ panel
session at the Linked Data Meetup in London on Wednesday.
Tim Berners-Lee has been amongst those rallying to the cause, and working
with Governments here and overseas to realise the opportunities in — first
— simply getting data out and — second — ensuring the structure and
linkages required if Government data is to form a useful foundation upon
which others reall... (more)

Image via CrunchBase
Chris Hathaway sees basic location information scattered across the websites
of hundreds — or thousands — of coffee shop chains, hotel groups, and
fast food joints, but argues that it’s almost impossible to do anything
more sophisticated with the data than find your closest Starbucks. His
company, AggData, is attempting to fill what he sees as a gap in the market;
scraping addresses and other facts off company websites to create simple
files of store locations that can then be enriched with coordinate data and
sold.
Customers for this data include competito... (more)